Posts in Government

The inclusion of an enhanced Accelerated Approval pathway, crafted by Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC), will help expedite the development of modern, targeted, and personalized therapies for patients suffering from serious and life-threatening diseases while preserving the FDA’s robust standards for safety and effectiveness. Senator Hagan is to be congratulated for her hard work and leadership on this very important provision.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced that the University of New Hampshire School of Law Library, which was designated as the Concord Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC.) on January 30, 2012, is now open to serve the intellectual property (IP) needs of the public.

The U.S. Commerce Department’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will host its second Clean Technology Partnership Meeting on Tuesday, June 12, 2012, to bring clean technology stakeholders together to share ideas, experiences and insights and provide a forum for discussion on how the USPTO can improve and expand on its clean technology programs.

In the QPIDS pilot, IDS submissions will be considered by the examiner before determining whether prosecution should be reopened. Prosecution will only be reopened where the examiner determines that reopening prosecution is necessary to address an item of information in the IDS. When the items of information in the IDS do not require prosecution to be reopened, the application will return to issue, thereby eliminating the delays and costs associated with RCE practice.

Information on the world’s specialized intellectual property courts can now be found in one place. The Study on Specialized Intellectual Property Courts, a joint effort published by the International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI) and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), is the first study to catalog the world’s specialized intellectual property court regimes. Not surprisingly, the study concludes that governments around the world should adopt some form of specialized IPR court to handle intellectual property cases. Specialized IPR courts were found to enhance efficiency, lead to more timely resolution and foster more consistent rulings and outcomes. Such courts are also an important signal to individuals and industry that a country takes intellectual property enforcement seriously, which we in the industry know is a precursor to economic development and outside investment.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced that it will open the current Trademark Law School Clinic Certification Pilot Program to admit 15 additional schools for the upcoming fall 2012 academic year. This pilot program allows law students to practice trademark law before the agency under the guidance of a law school faculty clinic supervisor. Submissions from interested law schools will be accepted through Monday, July 2, 2012.

Washington – The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is seeking nominations to fill upcoming vacancies for the Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) and the Trademark Public Advisory Committee (TPAC). Nominations must be postmarked or electronically transmitted on or before June 11, 2012. Submission details can be found in the Federal Registration Notice. The committees were created in 1999 through Patent…

Yes, it was I. The former Borat applying patent examiner turned law student. See Prior Borat: Non-traditional Prior Art Rejections! If nothing other than offering comic relief, the now infamous Borat patent rejection has hopefully illustrated at least one fundamental truth to the inventor and patent practitioner alike – don’t forget to do a thorough search of non-patent literature. I won’t bore you with citations from the MPEP. We all know what the Manual says. Instead I will attempt to provide some general insights into the examination process.

The Patent Office recently requested comment on the paperwork that applicants submit during post-filing, pre-allowance patent prosecution (Patent Processing (Updating), comment request., 77 Fed. Reg. 16813-17 (Mar. 22, 2012)). This is a highly significant opportunity to seek reform of problematic PTO regulations, one that only comes once every three years. This comment period gives the public access to an oversight officer outside the PTO whose job is to help reduce costs associated with PTO regulations or MPEP guidance that create unnecessary paperwork burden. The PTO has invited the public to challenge long-standing rules, and to seek reform.

Maybe it is the result of the case being of such little importance to the patent system as a whole, or maybe it is just evidence that every blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. Whatever the case may be, the United States Supreme Court yesterday did get it right in a patent case. Virtually no one brings appeals from the Patent Office to the district court under § 145 despite the far more favorable review standard, which we have known about at least since 1999 in Dickinson v. Zurko. § 145 will remain an infrequently used relic of the patent system, and we are left to lament that it would have been far better for the Supreme Court to get Mayo v. Prometheus right than for them to get Kappos v. Hyatt right. Sigh.

The thing that struck me most from these survey results was the superiority of USPTO searches. I’m sure you have heard the same criticisms and joking that I have. Many, particularly Europeans, love to criticize and even make fun of the searches done by the USPTO. If anything these survey results suggest that the USPTO does a better search than is done in the UKIPO. After all, under UKIPO practice, examiners only cite extra documents if they are more relevant than those already found by the UK search. So when they rely on US references that means they must have been more relevant than what they found. So much for the alleged inferiority of USPTO searches.

Today I attended the an event on Intellectual Property and the US Economy which was held in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds. The purpose of the event was to unveil a study — Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Industries in Focus — prepared by the Economics and Statistics Administration and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The study found that intellectual property intensive industries support at least 40 million jobs in the United States and contribute more than $5 trillion dollars to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). That is to say that 27.7% of all jobs in the U.S. were either directly or indirectly attributable to IP-intensive industries, and the amount contributed to the U.S. economy represents a staggering 34.8% of GDP.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Invent Now® and the National Academy of Inventors™ invite you to the Florida Regional Inventors Conference, a great chance to get practical advice from expert USPTO staff and to network with fellow creative entrepreneurs. The conference will be held April 27-28, 2012 at the Embassy Suites Hotel located on the campus of the University of South Florida.

How this will philosophically change things remains unclear because the America Invents Act requires that the petition filed to institute a derivation proceeding demonstrate that the claimed invention in the subject application or patent was derived from an inventor named in the petitioner’s application without authorization. The Patent Office has also recognized the similarity between derivation proceedings and interference practice, saying: “Petitions to institute derivation proceedings, while distinct from interference practice, raise similar issues to those that may be raised in interferences in a motion for judgment on priority of invention. Currently, motions for judgment on priority of invention, including issues such as conception, corroboration…” See 77 Fed. Reg. 7035 (10 February 2012).

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Hungarian Intellectual Property Office (HIPO) signed a Memorandum of Understanding making permanent the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) program between the two offices and setting forth the common desire to implement further developments of the PPH program during a high level event in Budapest honoring Hungarian inventors and innovative companies.